Then the world stopped.
Brian felt the stillness before he saw it. It was as if some subtle pulse he’d heard all his life—the quiet hum of the universe—had gone silent. He gasped, looking up to find the roiling clouds were now completely motionless. The wind had died as well, far too suddenly. Brian whirled around, searching the school courtyard, where he noticed one of the social studies teachers, Ms. Joanna, standing at the far end.
Something was wrong. Brian didn’t know what, but he knew that right now, he didn’t want to be alone.
Heart pounding, he hefted his tuba case and rushed toward the teacher, not casting another look back at the strange hourglass. If he had, he’d have seen the trickle of sand continue, the lower bulb slowly filling with twinkling red grains.
Ms. Joanna was digging through her purse, probably retrieving her car keys. But as Brian got closer, he noticed she was strangely static. Unnaturally so. Her eyes were on her purse, her left foot raised as if to take a step. But she didn’t take it. Instead, she balanced perfectly in place on one foot, more astonishingly still than even a ballerina could achieve.
“Ms. Joanna?” Brian tried.
She didn’t answer. Didn’t look at him. She didn’t even move.
Which was when Brian saw the keys.
Ms. Joanna must have dropped them while fishing them from her purse. They hung suspended in the air just beneath it, the keys fanned out into a sheepish, toothy smile, as if caught in the act of sneaking away.
But they didn’t fall. They didn’t fall.
“No …” Brian muttered. “That’s not possible.”
He dropped his tuba case and raced for the inside doors, yanking them open. A few kids remained in the halls, but as with Ms. Joanna, each figure was frozen in place. Their mouths gaped open midconversation, their feet balanced in dangling strides.
Somehow, the world had stopped for everyone except Brian.
He took a deep breath, just to prove that he could, and pulled at his hair. He was awake. He was alive. This was real. Brian approached a boy and girl several feet away, seventh graders he dimly recognized as members of the drama club. The girl had swept back her long hair with a hand; it hung suspended in the air like decorative Halloween cobwebs.
Brian laughed. He couldn’t help it. This was too bizarre. Too preposterous! Moving back to the door, he peered outside again and was surprised to see his tuba case hanging in midair—frozen in time the moment he dropped it.
“Unreal,” he said, laughing again.
His blood curdled the moment he heard a second voice laughing with him.
Slowly, Brian turned. Across the lobby, a figure stood at the end of a long hallway, one in which the lights had already been cut off for the day. Brian squinted. He couldn’t make out many details. The figure was tall—a teacher, maybe?—and it was every bit as still as everything else. Until it wasn’t.
The figure glided forward in a single, languid movement, rounding and winding as it went, but always pointed in his direction. It tread a circuitous path that felt deceptively hostile to Brian—menace disguised as playfulness. Then, just as suddenly as it’d moved, the figure stopped, still shrouded in darkness.
“Hello?” Brian called, startled by the naked fear in his own voice. “Do you know what’s going on? Why is everyone frozen?”
The stranger said nothing, but Brian could feel its eyes on him. He took a step backward, his hip pressing against the push bar that opened the door.
The figure glided slowly forward again, zigzagging into the light, then paused.
It was an old woman. She was white—pale, but most were in a town as gloomy as New Rotterdam—and wore a knit cardigan and jeans. She looked like any number of sweet New England grandmothers, with a halo of gray-white hair and a disarming, if slightly confused, smile. She must be here to pick some kid up from their after-school activities. Still, she looked a bit bewildered to Brian. Like she didn’t quite know where she was.
“Are you okay?” he asked. “Do you need help?”
“Help?” the woman repeated back at him.
“I don’t know what’s going on,” Brian said. “But … but are you here for someone?”
“Here for someone …” the old woman echoed again. “I’m here for you, Brian.”
She smiled, and Brian noticed for the first time that the woman had too few teeth. What teeth she did have were long and thin and needlelike. Almost like …
Like fangs.
The woman kept smiling, her grin growing wider and deeper, her teeth longer and sharper. And all this time, she wore the same bewildered expression, even as her jaw unhinged and her mouth gaped open—revealing a ruddy cavity lined in stubby, jagged points.
Brian’s feet were moving before his mind had caught up.
He slammed the door open, screaming as he tore through the courtyard, past Ms. Joanna and her suspended keys. Glancing behind him, he caught a blur of movement that wound to his right flank, before curving back around again to his left. It was so fast. Impossibly fast!
He pushed forward, ignoring the dizzying sweeps and curls of whatever hunted him. Soon he burst from the courtyard and into the school parking lot, where dozens of parents and teachers awaited.
Some greeted their children with petrified smiles, while others were packed into idling cars. Steam burped upward from exhaust pipes, suspended in time like morning fog clinging stubbornly past its welcome. The lights were bright, the school’s flood beams casting the scene into a strange diorama of families reuniting.
“Help!” Brian shrieked at the assembled adults. “Help me, PLEASE!”
But none of them turned.
None of them even saw poor Brian as he fled for his life.
Nor did they see the writhing shape that pursued him, curving around his left and striking from the side. It took him in full view of a dozen adults, and no one moved a muscle to help.
New Rotterdam was no place to grow up.
Back in the courtyard, the hourglass flowed—its glittering scarlet sand carefully measuring an hour’s worth of time.
